General Commentnot sure but here's a guess. he's making a film, realizing that the film, like a dream, reflects himself and his psyche.

this may be a stretch but: "dancing with a distant friend", as dancing is a form of interacting with another person or communicating with an audience, making a film could be a way of dancing with a distant friend, i.e., communicating over a distance rather than dancing physically up close or live.

"association whore" is an odd phrase. My best guess is that refers to free association, the psychoanalytic technique. in this context a "whore" is someone who is obsessed with getting a lot of something, i.e., attention whore. The narrator, as a filmmaker, is a "whore" for "association" in that he's obsessed with learning about himself through filmmaking.

the vagueness of the lyrics goes to the theme of psychoanalysis and free association. vague lyrics can be interpreted in different ways like a Rorschach test and the interpretation tells something about the interpreter rather than about the inkblot.

It is hard to guess but I don't think that 21 years old Vince Clarke could write songs about psychoanalytics :) It is even hard to guess because of different transcriptions of this song. For example "association whore" is sometimes "association hall", "fused" becomes "viewed", "Clean cut so we're sounding fast" may be "Clean cut, some were sounding fast" ...
But I guess that song describes dreaming as is ... there are things without order.